A student of one of my courses recently asked, “I need a tool, which does the same job as BitrateViewer but for HEVC. Which tool do you use when you need to get some sort of a plot or just a list of bitrates per each second?” Great question. If you don’t know Bitrate Viewer,…
My article, The State of CMAF: The Holy Grail or Just Another Format?, just published on the Streaming Media website. Here’s the enticing intro: The holy grail of streaming is a single set of files that you can safely deliver to all target endpoints. The most likely candidate to help achieve this is the Common…
At its most basic level, streaming media is the delivery of audio and video files from a server to a client over the internet or a cellular data network. The first streaming audio was delivered in 1995, while the first streaming video followed two years later; you can read more about the early history of…
We’ve been following the story of DASH royalties since MPEG LA first announced the pool back in 2015. Recently, the pool stopped offering licenses, which seemed to cease any assertions of royalties. But as I just wrote about in Streaming Media magazine, one of the pool members, Helios Streaming along with Ideahub, sued Showtime, Vudu,…
Though I spend most of my time focusing on video production and encoding, I’m also fascinated by how organizations are actually using video in their day-to-day operations. So when Vidyard released their second annual Video in Business Benchmark Report (freely downloadable here) I had to give it a quick scan. Briefly, Vidyard is a video…
One of my three sessions at Streaming Media East. Here’s the description; link to handout below. Note: one issue that came up during the discussion was the ability for systems to handle multiple language and captions. After the presentation, I heard from a representative from Go Easy Live who stated, “As additional informational, I confirm…
Now that programs like Wirecast and vMix make it simple to perform side-by-side interviews like my recent interview with Beamr’s Dror Gill below, I’ve been doing more of them. The tension has always been regarding video quality. Specifically, do I connect a camera to my HP notebook, or go with its internal webcam or my…
The graph below shows two off-the-shelf players retrieving the same HLS manifest under the similar test conditions, which vary from 512 kbps at the low end to 5120 kbps at the top end. On the left, Player A, stopped retrieving video multiple times during the low bandwidth transmissions, stalling playback, which are the red lines…
As recently as June, HEVC seemed to have more momentum than the Golden State Warriors and New England Patriots combined, courtesy of Apple’s adding HEVC to HLS. Then, in the span of 30 days in January, the balloon popped as a trio of seismically negative events cast a dark shadow on HEVC’s future relevance and…
Wowza ClearCaster is a $6,000 encoder from Wowza, that at first glance may cause you to repeat the company’s name loudly, as in, “Wowza, that’s a high price for a single channel streaming appliance.” Perhaps so, but it’s the only encoder that can stream 1080p to Facebook Live, and as I learned when I reviewed…
